Cloud-based storage and on-line services are readily available and continue to develop rapidly. Enterprise customers, such as in the medical and financial sectors, save money and streamline business processes by outsourcing the storage and computation of their data to public storage, such as provided by cloud-based services. Instead of storing and managing a large amount of data locally, a medical service provider, for example, can utilize cloud storage for electronic medical records of patient data, and a financial service provider can utilize the cloud storage for financial data and customer records. However, using public cloud-based storage can potentially expose data, compromising the privacy and security of the personal medical, financial, and other sensitive data.
One effective technique is to store private and sensitive data in an encrypted form in the public cloud-based storage, and perform computations on the encrypted data directly. However, typical block ciphers do not allow encrypted data to be used in encrypted form, and meaningful computation on the encrypted data would either require it to be returned to the owner of the data for decryption, or alternatively, for the cloud-based storage service to have access to the decryption key. Homomorphic encryption refers to encryption schemes used to encrypt data in a way that allows evaluating Boolean or arithmetic circuits on the data while it remains encrypted. Homomorphic encryption may also refer to encryption schemes with less capabilities, such as for performing only additions or only multiplications on the encrypted data. However, the conventional techniques used to evaluate homomorphic encrypted data are significantly less efficient than operating on unencrypted data, such as if the data is returned to the owner of the data for decryption.